Milton and Tennyson's "Guinevere"

Abstract

Readers have even from earliest associated with two classical poets: Theocritus and Virgil. Charles relates that these two writers were in fact his grandfather's favorites.' distinction between these affinities must be considered in large part one between formal and metaphysical aspects of Tennyson's poetry: his highly-wrought idylls and epyllia cast him in some sense in role of a Victorian Alexandrian, yet his allpervading mood of melancholy and of deep-felt loss associate him in telling ways with Virgil.2 When T. S. Eliot calls the master of metrics and melancholia, however, he is articulating a realization that form and mood need not or may not be separable;3 endless pathos of Dido's tale winds strands from Hellenistic epic (Apollonius Rhodius' Argonautica) and an epyllion by Catullus (64) inextricably together with both Odyssean markers (Nausicaa, Calypso) and Greek tragedy (Euripides' Medea). Virgil can be Hellenistic and still be Virgil: in Tennyson's To Virgil, as Herbert F Tucker, Jr., points out, Roman poet is celebrated for his language and his forms as well as for his noble sadness. By insisting on a connection between form and metaphysical despair, Tucker is all more convincing when he says once again, Tennyson is most Vergilian of English Poets.4 We need to understand Idylls of King as formally related to moments of idyll in epic such as fourth books of Aeneid and Paradise Lost.5 What there is in Tennyson's Idylls of Theocritean or its adaptations is always surrounded by an expanse of epic gravitas and moral seriousness. Idylls of King are to be distinguished from English Idyls, not just in spelling, which employed to differentiate them from ordinary pastorals, but also in genitive of King.6 King's presence surrounds ten tales grouped under heading The Round Table in framing tales of Arthur's advent and departure. Arthur's ghostly history and ideals are always in background to hold flush against progressing idylls. As we move from golden etiological Coming of Arthur toward beauti-